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Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Pat Buchanan: US and Catholicism in Crisis

During the 1950s, the twin pillars of worldwide anti-communism were
Dwight Eisenhower's America and the Roman Catholic Church of Pope Pius
XII.

During the 1980s, the last decade of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan
and the Polish pope, John Paul II, were the pillars of resistance.

When Pope Francis arrives in Washington on Tuesday afternoon,
the country he enters will be a very different one from Eisenhower's
America or Reagan's America. And Catholics will be welcoming a new kind
of pope.

In America 2015, homosexuality, abortion on demand and same-sex
marriage — shameful crimes in Ike's America, mortal sins in the
catechism of Pius XII — have become constitutional rights.

These represent the values that define Barack Obama's America,
the values our officials defend at the United Nations, the values we
preach to the world.

What Ike's America saw as decadence, Obama's America calls
progress. And among its noisiest celebrants are our Catholic vice
president, Joe Biden, and the Catholic leader of the Democratic Party in
the House, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Since Eisenhower's time, Christianity, the faith that created
the West, has been purged from American public life. The Bible, prayer,
and all Christian art, books and symbols have been expunged from the
public schools as they were in Cuba when Fidel Castro took power.

Our cradle faith cannot be taught in our public schools.

America is a different country today, a secular and
post-Christian nation on its way to becoming anti-Christian. Some feel
like strangers in their own land. And from the standpoint of traditional
Catholicism, American culture is an open sewer. A vast volume of the
traffic on the Internet is pornography.

Ironically, as all this unfolds in what was once "God's
country," Vladimir Putin seeks to re-establish Eastern Orthodox
Christianity as the basis of morality and law in Russia. And one reads
in The Wall Street Journal on Monday that Xi Jinping is trying to
reintroduce his Chinese Communist comrades to the teachings of
Confucianism.

The world is turned upside down. Every civilization seems to
recognize the necessity of faith except for the West, which has lost its
faith and is shrinking and dying for lack of it.

In a New York Times article this month — "Are Western Values Losing Their Sway?" — Steven Erlanger writes:

"In its rejection of Western liberal values of sexual equality
and choice, conservative Russia finds common cause with many in Africa
and with the religious teachings of Islam, the Vatican, fundamentalist
Protestants and Orthodox Jews."

Yet what Erlanger describes as "conservative Russia" does seem
to share values with America, only it is the America of 1955, another
country from the America of 2015.

Which raises a question: Does moral truth change?

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "The best test of truth is
the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of
the market."

But is this true? A decade after his beer hall putsch failed in
Munich, Adolf Hitler's Nazi party won the largest number of Germans ever
to vote in a democratic election.

He had succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. Did that democratic ratification make Hitler's ideas true?

Or does truth exist independent of the marketplace?

Secular America, which has purged Christianity, preaches a new
gospel to the world: liberal democracy as the salvation of mankind.

Yet did not Winston Churchill, icon of the democracy
worshippers, tell us that "the best argument against democracy is a
five-minute conversation with the average voter"?

The Catholic Church, too, faces a growing crisis of moral consistency and credibility.

The church of Pius XII and John Paul II taught that the truths
of the Ten Commandments brought down from Sinai and the truths of the
Sermon on the Mount are eternal. Those popes also taught that a valid
marriage is indissoluble, that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral,
that abortion is the killing of the innocent unborn, an abomination.

Yet one reads regularly of discussions inside the Vatican to
alter what is infallible church teaching on these doctrines to make the
church more appealing to those who have rejected them.

As the pope arrives in America, some Catholics are calling for
an acceptance of contraception, the ordination of women and a new
acceptance of homosexuality. Yet the Episcopalians, who have embraced
all these "reforms" and more, appear to be going the way of James
Fenimore Cooper's Mohicans.

In Cuba, Pope Francis declined to address the repression of the
Castro brothers. Will he also avoid America's moral crisis to chatter on
about income inequality and climate change and find common ground with
Obama?

What has come out of the Vatican in the past two years is moral
confusion. Yet as Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput reminds us,
"confusion is of the devil." It is also trifling with schism.

Having emerged victorious in the 70-year ideological struggle
against one of the greatest enemies that mankind has ever known,
Marxism-Leninism, are the United States and the Catholic Church heading
for the same desuetude and disintegration?

This website is dedicated to a renewal of Christian culture. It is inspired by Sir Winston Churchill, a valiant defender of Christian civilization, who believed "we have a great treasure to guard; that the inheritance in our possession represents the prolonged achievement of the centuries." With Churchill, we believe that a "fraternal association" of the English-speaking peoples must "for their own safety and for the good of all walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace.”